Untitled, 1966

Frank Lobdell

San Franciscoâ€“based Frank Lobdell studied and worked alongside Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira, and like these gifted draftsmen, he was intrigued by the possibilities of printmaking. He experimented with lithography in 1948 while studying at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, using both an offset and a traditional press to test the tonal refinements allowed by the technique. In 1950 he traveled to Paris and worked with a master printer in a collaborative relationship that would not become the standard in the United States until the establishment of Tamarind Lithography Workshop some 10 years later. Lobdell began a decades-long career teaching at Stanford the same year he was invited to Tamarind, where he created 33 lithographs in just eight weeks. The prints present the formal vocabulary that he had established in his paintingsâ€”expressionist gesture and anthropomorphic shapes, with vibrant areas of color.